Find below an experimental class that implements a FastShiftOut Class which is derived from the Print class. This means that all print and println interfaces are available to FSO, including printing of strings, floats and ints.The class does not implement the latch signal (e.g. to be used for one or more 74HC595)

Note: the timings found above might be hard to reproduce as my print.cpp and print.h contains several speed ups (including experimental).These are discussed in this thread - http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=167414.0 -